Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
Posted on 07/05/2008 12:19:44 PM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
Nick Sylvester is a father of two small children who uses wood pellets to heat his home.
"I am a fan of the pellets, I don't have the time to stoke," Sylvester said. "I want a thermostat and be able to walk away. There is no overheating, or it shuts down."
Sylvester is also the product manager for Superior Hearth, Spas & Leisure with stores in Southington and Avon.
With home heating oil expected to reach $4.75 to $5 per gallon, homeowners are flocking to get a closer look at fireplace inserts, pellet and wood burning stoves to heat their homes. According to Sylvester and others, the savings can pay for the stove in a single season.
"We're really getting hammered," Sylvester said. "We saw the weather changing and the price of oil, and we allocated 50 percent more than what we sold last year."
Sylvester has had one customer who turned over his deposit on a spa tub to put down on a pellet stove.
"This is about needs versus wants," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at myrecordjournal.com ...
OM_! Hear the screams of Mother Earth as her children are cut down and burned!!!
What about the acid rain?
Self-Preservation and Tactical Advantage
A research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense awarded $5 million to a North Dakota research and development facility to create a surrogate for military-grade jet fuel, JP-8. In a span of just 18 months, researchers plan to deliver a domestically produced, renewable fuel that’s virtually indistinguishable from its petroleum-based counterpart.
By Ron Kotrba
Projections from the U.S. Department of Defense estimate fuel losses during combat—not what is actually used to fight—will amount to $86.8 million in 2008. In-theater fuel supplies suffer losses from extreme desert heat where tactical “bag-farm” storage sites aren’t equipped with vapor recovery systems. Vehicles of war hit by enemy fire and those suffering from mechanical breakdowns, which are subsequently destroyed, also contribute to the loss of fuel in battle. Not only is actual fuel lost, but it also costs millions to transport and store multiple grades of fuels that can be accessed for effective tactical operations, especially in politically unstable regions. “The cost is anywhere from $100 to $400 to get one gallon of fuel to the battlefield,” says Ted Aulich, research leader with the Grand Forks, N.D.-based Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC), the recent recipient of a $5 million contract from the defense department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The U.S. military is working on producing solutions to mitigate these and many other economic losses associated with fuel use in war.
“The military has this ‘single battlefield-fuel’ concept,” Aulich says. “They are trying to use a single fuel for aircraft, Humvees, tanks and everything in between.” While this may not sound economical—burning high-quality jet fuel in Humvees—what’s another dollar or two per gallon when the transportation costs are already so high? Furthermore, national security naturally comes into play. Domestic rhetoric pushing for the proliferation of renewable fuels frequently hinges on national security, which is ultimately about preserving a way of life and proactively avoiding interruption if foreign oil shipments should cease.
http://www.biomassmagazine.com/article.jsp?article_id=1155
It’s a shame that the price of wood pellet have gone up tremendously in the last couple of years as well.
poor liberals, its seems like only yesterday that they were wishing for higher gas prices like they pay in europe to drive down CO2 emissions
be careful what you wish for
I always wonder if at the turn of the century people thought cars would elimnate the worst pollution of the day,
horse manure.
Everybody should do this. Not enough wood might be a drawback and not enough water to put out burning hovels could be a problem.
They want us to live in em not cut em down. These people would prefer us to leave decisions like what to wear, what to eat, where to go and what to do up to a committee.
This is a “new idea”?
Wood stove fuel pellets do not require wood be cut down to make them. They are made out of sawdust from wood being cut for other purposes, that is what is rather ingenious about it - someone decided istead of having to truck the sawdust away and pay to do it, to turn it into a product that has almost no ash left to deal with, is safe and cheap and would otherwise be wasted.
It also makes excellent pet litter as it gives off no toxic fumes, and is extremely safe for people and animals, and cheap. And it actually combats urine odor.
I had a pellet stove for several years, when I lived in the far north. It was great! They take only a small fraction of the effort of burning cord wood (which I did for decades).
They can easily be retrofitted; because they don’t require a standard chimney (they install like a gas-burning heater — just a 6” hole in the wall behind the stove will do in most cases).
They’re also safer, because only a few ounces of pellets are in the fire pit at any time. If you shop around, you’ll find fire insurance costs a lot less for pellet stoves than for cord-wood burners.
If wood pellets are expensive or in short supply where you live; there are all sorts of alternative pellet fuels. Corn, switchgrass, peanut shells, etc. can be burned in pellet stoves (you have to get the right stove). Wood pellets are plentiful where I live, because of the pine beetle infestation. Still, price will always be based on what the market will bear.
Why stop at wood? We need to pellitize cow chips too.
There is not enough wood on the planet for everybody to do this.
How about not using oil and gas to generate electricity and use coal instead?
Oh, and bat guano pellets too.
I don’t advocate everyone do this. Where in my post did I say I think everyone in the world do this? Please read what I type, not what you think I’m saying.
I just think it’s cool that someone looked at the ‘waste’ everyone else looked at and saw the potential for a good product. It spawned a whole new type of stove industry to take advantage of it. Plus people are using it for things the inventor never even thought of (pet litter).
LOL
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
Wood burning stoves and wood pellet stoves are not the same thing. You can’t burn actual wood logs in a wood burning stove.
Do you know if these places make a distinction between ‘wood burning’ and ‘wood pellet’ stoves? I would think, being liberal, they would, because pellet stoves are burning a recycled waste product (compressed sawdust) as opposed to the ‘lumber’.
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